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Life In The Cosmos
Could intelligent life arise elsewhere in the universe?
Today, no one knows whether or not life is a phenomenon confined entirely to our home planet Earth. Although biochemists and other researchers continue to elucidate the mechanisms whereby cells can come into existence and then replicate, and although there’s evidence to indicate life emerged on Earth a mere billion or so years after the planet formed, we still have no solid understanding of the transition between living and non-living things. At the present time, therefore, any speculation regarding life elsewhere in the universe is based entirely on extrapolation from current knowledge and can only be an exercise in logical reasoning.
That said, there are some reasonable conclusions we can draw without venturing out to the wilder reaches of Sci-Fi fantasy. As we learn more and more about extremophiles, it is apparent that self-organizing biochemistry is astonishingly adaptable and resilient. We’ve found bacteria that live for thousands of years deep inside certain types of rock, eking out a living at a metabolic rate nearly indistinguishable from total stasis. We’ve found tiny creatures that can survive being exposed to the vacuum of space for days on end, and we’ve learned that certain bacteria can survive such conditions for even longer. We’ve found animals living deep under the ocean…
